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Mount and Blade: Warband is a medieval RPG/combat/ruler simulator. The game is made by Taleworlds whom are currently working on Mount and Blade II: Banner lord. Release date: SOON (I hope) The game takes place in the fictional land of Calradia where there are 6 factions all fighting each other for more land and power. The land is filled with lords from the factions, caravans, bandits, manhunters and many more. You are dropped into the middle of it all and are left to make your own way/story.
The game starts with you forming a small party and possibly (well most likely) going onto having a huge army/armies. There is no actual story line anywhere in the game to be found, besides a few claimants having a story of being wronged. In the true sense of a sandbox, you get to shape the world and make your own story as you go. Each time you start a new game, the world is slightly altered, with certain things changing in each world. The kings and a few choice lords stay the same (with the fiefs (towns, castles, villages) they receive plus their personalties), but other lords get different personalities, fiefs and even change which family they are in with each new game you load up. I believe also the ladies on that faction move around as to whom they are related to also.
This helps mix up the world and makes it just different enough each time to keep it interesting. No game is the same with the AI playing differently every game as to whom they are at war with at what time and what they manage to conquer all without your involvement. While the game moves a bit slower before you start to get involved with factions, it still moves in one direction or another all based on what is going on in the world at the time. I have noticed though that over the last few patches that the NPC lords seem to be a bit more aggressive and the world changes a lot more and faster than it did before. Which I personally think is a good thing as the game really did move slow and really did require you to intervene A LOT to make anything at all significant happen.
As you go along, you have many options; You can become a bandit, preying on caravans and villages. A slaver, defeating bandits (or other lords??) keeping and rounding up any that are not dead to sell for coin. You can be a mercenary for a faction joining their war against whom ever they are waging it at the time. Eventually you can join one of the factions more permanently, becoming a lord or make your own one if you wish. You can even end up becoming a leader of your own faction and start to claim your self as king/queen.
The ways to “win” or “finish” the game is to take over the entire map and unite the world under a faction banner or your own. There is also an option for you to stop and finish your adventure any time in the game, which gives you a small blurb as to what happened in your life afterwards. Choosing this early, usually leads to you just fading out of existence leading a normal quiet life. But the “real” 2 ways to "finish" the game; one is to become ruler over Calradia yourself. The other is to help someone else become ruler over all the lands. The second option of helping others actually consists of 3 different ways of doing so:
- Help a current king become ruler of Calradia
- Help one of the claimant http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Claimants overthrow a faction and help them become ruler of Calradia
- Or if you were to play a women, you can marry a lord and convince him to become a king.
Mount and blade, Mount and blade: Warband, With Fire and Sword, Napoleonic wars, Viking Conquest??? What are all of these?
Mount and Blade was the original game. It was abandoned at some point and a standalone "expansion" of Warband was made. Warband is pretty much a finished Mount and Blade with more features and options, such as becoming king. Also added was an extra faction and there was some changes with textures, animations, sounds etc. There is no reason to buy or play the original other than for modules (mods) which have not been ported to Warband.
With fire and sword is a standalone Fan made paid for "DLC" module that added guns, but took out a lot of other good stuff or changed the way a few things work. With out going into all of it, over all the guns are cool, but a lot of other things were in the game suck.
Napoleonic wars is a multiplayer only module that takes place during 19th century, with guns. A lot of the games are organised though I do believe there are some games here and there that you can just join randomly.
Viking Conquest is another Fan made paid for DLC Module that I have not played yet. It takes place during the historical Dark Age Britain.
LP Rule Set
The game will be played on the attached difficulty:
Besides 2 items, these are the hardest settings. The only 2 items that are not set on full are Lance Control (a “Hard” setting just increases the time it takes for you to be able to couch your lace) and Combat speed. The higher speed just seems ridiculous and “faster” is already pretty damn fast. Other than that, there is nothing above good for combat/campaign AI and nothing above normal for damage to player/friends.
Other rule notes
I will be playing this game with realistic saving. This means that after EVERY action/event, the game saves over one save. This means there is no save scumming and reloading. What happens, happens.
Diplomacy Module
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=285119009
I will be playing this game with the Diplomacy module. This doesn’t really change any of the core game play, but adds a lot more options that you can have when running your own kingdom or just your own town. A few examples as follows:
- The factions in the game all have different options as to how they collect taxes, how the people get treated and what not. When you make your own faction, you get defaulted to what ever is middle ground. This mod opens up the options so that you can pick a certain style for your faction out of one of the existing ones or totally make your own custom rules. Such as how much taxes to collect and what not. This in turn affects a few things like how your people will like you and also the lords as to how they like the way you run your kingdom. I remember somewhere that if you pick some option somewhere that a lord really really dislikes, you will lose anywhere from 1-3 relationship points a day with said lord until you “fix it”. At the same time, there are lords where you will gain that 1-3 relationship points because they like your policies.
- There are now 3 NPC's added that sit in your castles/towns that options for finances and military. An example would be your military advisor can give you information on your current troops in all of your fiefs as well as updates as to what is happening in any wars you are involved in. He can also do a few things like move your troops from once place to another or send out a recruiter to gather new troops for you. This means you don't spend time running around doing that yourself. Now you might think that this is breaking the original game, except; there are down sides, like you paying double the price for the troops compared to if you went and got them yourself. If you're at war with a faction or the recruiter runs into some bandits and get defeated, he may get killed and not return thus wasting your money. Also the recruiter drains the villages of troops just like you do, so if you send out more than one at a time, they will have further to travel to get the troops you are after.
There are a lot of other examples of things you can do with this mod that I will mention if I remember what they are. The point however is, as seen in the two examples above, everything is balanced, not over powered, is there for a reason and fits with the theme of the game. This module adds a lot more customisation that should have been in the game in the first place. This mod has also become somewhat a standard and is used in most of the other modules that people make for this game.
Other changes to my game
I have put over 1k hours into this game and have yet to ever finish it. Late game gets a bit boring and starting from scratch is a lot more fun. I have found a lot of “issues” or things that just require a bit of tweaking or some mods to make the overall game more fun/better. The mods and tweaks that I have chosen to implement are aimed to fit with in the game world and not be overpowered or something that stands out and changes the game in a stupid way. I will list every mod that I have added and every tweak that I have adjusted the game to.
Arena Overhaul mod 1.0 – Every town has an arena where tournaments are held. Every faction and every town has a different style as to what weapons you use and if you get horses or not. What doesn’t change in every arena is the layout of each arena. Besides the outer walls looking different depending on where you are, each arena is basically a boring open field that is somewhat round/oval/rectangle with nothing to it. This mod changes every arena to be unique and to actually have obstacles inside them either helping or hindering you. I have ran into things before on a horse coming to a full stop and then getting defeated. Same with arenas that add bushes that you can't see through but the AI can. Either way, this ends up feeling and looking 100 times better than just the open fields that every town normally has.
http://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?id=1760
El Arte De La Guerra 'Official' Siege Fix 1.5.5 - A lot of the sieges are very boring, bland and make it easy or hard for you either attacking or defending when there's just one ladder going in. This expands a lot of the siege grounds making them much more interesting and in some cases, actually making it harder for you.
http://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?id=2694
Cinematic Compilation - Graphic & Sound Enhancement, enough said.
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=199149.0
TweakMB- Not a mod, but I have used this to tweak certain things of the game as follows:
http://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?id=1751
- I have bumped up the bandits to be able to amass around 90 sized parties. Makes it a bit of a pain for the AI, but the smaller parties late game are just so much easier at the 60~ they they are normally capped to.
- There is a job/quest or two where you have to lead cows from one place to the other. The mini map game has you "herding" them by walking behind them to get them to move in the opposite diction towards where you want them to go. This gets really tedious 30 seconds into the first time you do this ever in your life, let alone the countless time you do it again later. I have switched the cows to follow my party instead. This mainly just saves a bit of time and makes these quests actually ok to take instead of trying to avoid them.
- When fighting in tournaments you can place bets onto your self to win allowing you to gain around 4000~ coin after winning via said bets. If you lose, you don't get any money back at all. In order to hasten the game a bit and not have me rolling around tournaments for months at a time (because it's the best way to make dosh) I have doubled the amount required for bets, which automatically doubles the winnings. So there is a down side, as I will be playing without being able to reload saves. So if I lose, I'm out of pocket.
- You can get around 8 companions to join your party and level them up just like you picking what the level up in. I used to have these companions around 10~ levels under me or so. The more I played this game over time, I somehow became more skilful in gaining levels much faster than companions. Now they are suppose to be somewhat behind you level wise, but it just gets harder to level them and it just becomes more and more annoying when quest exp gets split between them. IE a quest gives you 2k EXP, if you have 1 companion, he also gets 2k EXP, if you have 2 companions, they now only receive 1k EXP each. And so on and so fourth. You used to be able to bump their exp to be more, but some recent game patch made it only effect their exp gain on everything but quests. So I have bumped them up to 2.5x the amount of everything else they do, ie get a kill, shared after battle exp. I have not figured out yet and can't find any information on boosting their exp via quests when there's more of them. So now when I have 8 companions, they all get one 8th of the total quest exp reward... If anyone knows anything about being able to change that, let me know. (hero_xp_multiplier bumping this value up doesn’t do anything for quests, I have tested)
- I have bumped the ability to capture a lord from 30% to 50/50%. AI plays differently compared to you due to a lot of reasons. A lot of people bitch about lords escaping a lot, but this is set due to their handicap of being AI. That and it would get really boring and easy if you had a 100% chance to capture them all the time. Yes, I know, they have a 100% chance to cap you if you lose, but you also have a much quicker/easier time of getting out then they do. Ether way, I do agree that 30% is a bit silly. That and the fact that I once played recently where I was going after lord on purpose and it still took me defeating 6x lords before 1 finally didn't escape on a 50% chance...
- I have altered the colours of factions a bit, doesn’t really effect game play. I may alter them again depending on how they look on the map. Mainly everyone that wasn't part of a faction was grey, I have altered that a bit and also made the main factions colours look a bit sharper. This is mainly just to allow stuff to stand out more on the world map.
- I have increased the max amount of troops on the field to 300 (150 is the game max default). This evens itself out and isn't really a benefit or loss to me. It also depends on the situation. But say, even attacking a town with 100~ troops and the town has 300~ a lot more of theirs will show up onto the field than mine even with high tactics skills. Over all though, it's a lot more fun and exciting.
- Battle continuation is enabled, not sure if this was patched into vanilla at some point. The game has an Automatic battle calculation, which is broken as fuck. Which is a worry as the AI uses it all the time when fighting each other. But to explain; when you get knocked out in a fight, the battle you are in ends and you get the option to surrender and all that, as well as also letting the fight “auto resolve”. So imagine you send in 50 Swadian Knights (the best Calvary unit in the game, armoured up, awesome weapons, on armoured horses) vs 20 looters (guys in their underwear with butter knives) and auto resolve calculates that 15~ of your knights were killed/wounded..... If you were to let loose 50 knights on 200 of these looters in a proper battle (one that actually plays out on the screen), even having 1-2 knocked out/killed is bullshit. So battle continuation is allowing the battle to keep going on what ever your last orders were and letting it play out instead of stopping 5 seconds after you're knocked out and forcing you to loose troops or even lose because the auto resolve “feature” is broken.
Lets Begin!
I want to try something a little bit different. I play a certain style, but I would like for others to create my character and the kind of style I will be playing. There are differences between Male and Female play through, mainly with relations to lords. The difficulty faced as a female can be somewhat overcome at some point. I was leaning more towards a male play through for a few reasons, but the achievements I have left to do in this game, are all related to playing as a female. If more people seem to wish to see a female play through though, I will totally roll that character.
So before I begin a new game, I am looking into input as to what everyone would like to see. Keep in mind, anything can change during the play through if people wish it to. If I end up recruiting from only one faction and people wish me to change later or use other faction troops, all of that is possible. If I start as a lord of one faction and people wish me to move to another one or to start my own or to get a claimant, all of this is possible at any time in the game. Either way, for the moment, I am looking for a response to the following:
It would be a good start would be reading the following if you have little or no experience with this game: http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Character_creation *
Name? (can also have a last name)
Male/Female?
Father*?
Early Life*?
Young adult*?
Motive*?
Combat build (Which Weapons should I be using)
Attributes (http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Attributes)
Skills** (http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Skills )
Which faction*** I should start with?
Should I limit myself to only use said factions troops?
Any other special rules you would like to see?
Any special requests?
* Please note that the story lines chosen give different skills/attributes. It would be a better idea to pick the kinds of stories that lead to the skills you would be looking for me to be focusing in.
** Please note, skills that are marked as party skills can be passed on to companions allowing me to focus on personal skills. I guess what I am after is more the kind of combat/leader build that you would be interested in seeing.
*** Keeping in mind this can change at any time:
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Factions
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Kingdom_of_Nords
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Khergit_Khanate
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Kingdom_of_Rhodoks
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Kingdom_of_Swadia
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Kingdom_of_Vaegirs
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Sarranid_Sultanate
http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Faction_Specialties
My Notes on factions:
Nords: Best infantry in the game, either worst or tied to Khergits in regards to ranged troops. No Calvary at all.
Khergit Khanate: Worst faction of all. No proper infantry, just Calvary and mounted archers. All horse skills useless when not mounted. Lancers are ok, but overall arguably the worst faction. This is a faction I have had no experience at all playing with and if I am locked into only recruiting from the faction I start with/join, I would prefer not to be this faction mainly because I may have to cheese a lot of things and I feel the game will take easily 1.5 times longer if not more due to the suckyness of this faction.
Rhodoks: Best ranged (crossbows) in whole game, very good infantry. Some people now calling this the meme faction as they are all around good in all areas of the game. No Calvary.
Swadia: Best cavalry, better ranged than Nords and Khergits. Possibly tied with Vaegirs or a step below? I would place their infantry 3rd tied with Sarranids & Vaegirs.
Vaegirs: The sort of jack of all trades, master of none. Best archers, but Rhodoks crossbows beat them. Calvary is good, but a noticeable enough down grade from Sarranids and Swadia. Infantry as stated, around the same tier as Sarranids/Swadia. This is a faction I have personally done very little with and would favour to try.
Sarranid Sultanate: second best Calvary (ever so slightly but just noticeable enough), Infantry as stated, around the same tier as Vaegirs/Swadia. High tier archers, slightly lower tier than Vaegirs. Their archers are also weird that they have throwing weapons instead of bows until the last 2 tiers of their levels... This is another faction that I have not had as much experience with as others.
LP Style
At this point I will be doing a full video play though. This may change more to a screenshot with text and the more “not boring” (probably battle parts) parts being uploaded via video? The game can slow down quiet a bit, but I can also edit boring sections to move a bit faster? We will see how we go and if people like my thoughts and ramblings about the aspects of the game and upcoming game that I will undoubtedly go into while doing the slow parts of the game.
Either way, I wish to keep on going commentary on board, not just with the above of the style of the playthrough, but also decisions the character makes over the course of the game. So as the story progresses, I will be open to suggestions as to what I should be doing now. Something along the lines of get more of these troops, pursue relations with these lords, go and help out the war front etc etc.
I may be possibly leading the game in the first few instances until people that have never played before know what the hell is going on. And there will undoubtedly be times where I will just have to grind something out (mainly exp/money wise). But we will see as we move along.